Google Legal Chief: Patent Reform a Balancing Act

Google Inc.’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in visit to Seoul Tuesday that the company is walking a fine line as it seeks reforms in the U.S. patent system in an effort to reduce the amount of litigation around mobile computing software and devices.

Google has been involved in numerous lawsuits over its Android software, used for smartphones and tablet computers, around the world. And several of the top manufacturers of Android-based products, including South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. and Taiwan’s HTC Corp. have also been swept in to litigation as proxies for Google by its software rivals Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

In a meeting with reporters at a Google-sponsored innovation forum, Mr. Drummond said he doesn’t think that its rivals enjoy the litigious environment in which they’re all caught up. “It doesn’t take much digging to find statements from Apple, Microsoft, all lamenting the fact that we have this patent litigation,” he said. “These are not companies that say we’re all about patents and wake up in the morning wanting to think about patents.”

He said the U.S. patent system makes it too easy for companies to get patents on software. “There are places in the world where you can’t get a software patent, or at least it’s harder, like Europe,” he said. “We think that’s probably the better way to go.”

But the difficulty in changing the U.S. patent system, he said, is that some reforms may threaten other industries, particularly capital-intensive ones such as pharmaceuticals and biotech that count on patents to provide a monopoly that yields a financial return on their risk-taking.

“I think what we need to do to is move past the one-size-fits-all and start thinking about software patents more specifically,” he said. “If you talk about software patents, I don’t think those other industries will feel as threatened.”

Mr. Drummond said that the lawsuits and court battles happening around mobile computing now are different from those that happened in the U.S. 20 or so years ago when the environment for personal computing was unsettled. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, for instance, chipmakers were engaged in lawsuits in multiple jurisdictions, not unlike what is happening now.

But Mr. Drummond drew a distinction between hardware and software battles.

“I would argue semiconductors fit the model for [patent] protection more than software does,” he said. “We’re talking about algorithms here. In some ways, it’s math. I think you’d want to be more careful about giving monopoly protection than you might for some hardware ideas. I don’t think we should just say ‘Well, this is the cycle we always go through.’”